True Freedom

Experiencing Genuine Reality

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-Albert Einstein

Each of us sees the world through a distorted filter woven of our mostly unconscious habits and beliefs. These beliefs may be so deeply ingrained in the fabric of our being that we regard what we experience via their influence as “the way things are”, or put even more simply, as “reality”. Beneath the filters, however, is a shared field of basic aliveness that is not limited in any way. It is a fundamental goodness that flows through our lives whether we are aware of it or not.

Although we go may through our lives following the whispered words of our memory or reacting to situation in ways familiar to the particular instructions and experiences of our past, we are not trapped by that distortion that we call “who I am”. To be free of it however, we must look directly at how we got confused.

Because our lives are unique, each of us experiences a different version of reality from the viewpoints of infinitely splintered “who I am”. We don’t really even know what another person experiences when they look at the color red. It may or may not be what we see. From this perspective, reality is on shaky ground, and we know it.

When we combine this echo of our own experience with the constant interaction with others in our lives who act from their own version of reality, we feel a constant nagging, vague and all pervasive sense of insecurity of things being not quite right. Over time, since we are not sure what alternative there is, we tend to hold on even tighter to our version of our self and the way we see things. We weave our reality filter of finer and finer thread in an attempt to solidify our world and ignore the dissonance. We become captives of our own thoughts.

Current shared beliefs that shape our reality:

Faster is better

More is better

People are inherently flawed

Something must be tangible or scientifically provable to be true

Love can be gotten from another person

The more money we have the, happier we will be

Some people are leaders most people are followers

Economic desires of human beings are the most important drivers of behavior

Our future demands that we let go of these and other shuttered self-involved views, and truly find a space of genuine mutual interest and curiosity — interest in our planet, in how people of differing views can work together, in how we can create sustainable business models, and how we can open our hearts and minds to being fully human. This will require educating our hearts, not just our minds.

As the products of late 20th century education and culture, we have emerged as adults with highly trained analytical and reasoning abilities. Our intuitive, expressive and emotional intelligences have not only been ignored, but belittled. This has led to the valuing of leaders who possess skill for competitive success, for outsmarting the competition. What is becoming clear is that our times demand we celebrate the leader of open heart, who knows how to harness creativity and collaboration in order to create the new structures needed for society in our times.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein

Yet another quote from Albert Einstein supports the need to educate our selves in new ways of thinking. Using the whole power of our mind will allow us to grow beyond obstacles we created with modes of thinking that served in the past. We are constantly evolving as individuals, societies, a planet and a universe. As conscious beings, we have a tremendous impact on the directions and pathways of our future. We have the freedom to change, but freedom always implies taking responsibility for exercising it.

Several years ago, I was invited to speak on the topic of freedom to a gathering in Philadelphia Pennsylvania on the 4th of July. I invited the group to reflect on the ultimate freedom that we have as human beings, the freedom to choose to be present to our life, not caught in a fantasy of what is occurring. In each moment afresh we have the opportunity to see clearly, and to meet the challenge or opportunity directly with an open heart and open mind. This is also the freedom to see and feel without preconception or prior judgment clouding our vision, a moment of possibilities.

People of every nation yearn for freedom, and as extremely important as the external freedoms are to happiness and fulfillment in our lives, our ultimate freedom is that no one can take away your freedom to choose how you work with your own mind.

Viktor Frankl, the courageous and wise Nazi concentration camp survivor said it this way in Man’s Search for Meaning, “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (1963, p. 104).